With SD-WAN & SASE: a digital workplace that inspires!

Working remotely and from home is an advantage for many. Parents and carers can multitask more easily, people with long commutes can be more productive. But there are challenges too: how can your company remain a recognizable entity, an organization, a team, a brand, when employees are working in different locations, cities or even countries? You need the right tools for this. It’s about more than just technology. The digital workplace is not a “place”, but the connections between places: shared understanding, online collaboration, cloud applications. People and tools brought together in the right way create a culture.

New technologies are moving toward the edge

For many, the technological “place” of their remote work is an SD-WAN: a virtual private network for your business that runs over encrypted connections over the public internet. Properly maintained, such “private over public” networks can be as fast and reliable as any expensive MPLS solution, and far more flexible. Your employees shouldn’t have to worry about connecting to each other.

The security makes this connection effective, of course. That’s the reason for SASE, or Secure Access Service Edge. This term was coined by Gartner to describe the way security, from user identification to login to permissions, is increasingly handled at the edge rather than in the data center. The purpose of Smart Edge is simple: to ensure that these devices work and interact smoothly so that your users don’t have to waste time with the technology. It’s not a product per se, but a catch-all term for the managed services you receive from a provider that ensure products from different hardware and software sources work together.

Connecting people must remain effortless

What works best, and creates a positive culture where employees always feel part of their team no matter how far apart their desks are, is a connection that is always on, always working and never requires the end user’s attention. This means that employees can work on whichever device they prefer: their office laptop or their smartphone. The technology should adapt to the users, not the users to the technology.

Three other “ingredients” are helpful: fixed Internet, mobile Internet and BYOA (Bring Your Own Access). Distributed sites may have broadband connections from an ISP or leased lines from a telco, but your digital nomads also need reliable mobile connections on the go. While working from home, they can use their own broadband connection. Only when they can use all options freely do people feel truly connected. Combined with edge services, this means that security and connectivity work in harmony, to the benefit of all users.

The path to the cloud: access to applications

Cloud services are usually the place where the applications run. For this reason, Cloud Acceleration, Cloud Connect and customized cloud solutions are an important building block in the corporate network. They not only provide access to resources in the cloud, but also ensure smooth operation with 24/7 availability. Cloud services are about much more than an application and a connection: computing loads and data bandwidth need to be constantly monitored, balanced and capacity managed. And your users should never see what’s going on under the surface.